Sex Tape

A tired premise and a sheen of desperation tanks this limp comedy, which plays more like a saucy seaside postcard than a fully-fledged movie. Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz had unexpected, sharp-tongued chemistry in 2011’s ‘Bad Teacher’; here, they sag into married stasis as an exhausted two-kid couple whose passions have cooled. As you’ll have guessed, they make a sex tape to spice things up. When that video leaks to the iCloud, a manic night of deleting and hunting iPads fills the runtime.

Explicit raunch was never on the cards, but you’d think the film could at least get it up for some cringey embarrassment. Surprisingly, chuckles do come from choice bits of grown-up nerdiness: one shocked neighbour, hearing of their three-hour sex bout, compares it to the movie ‘Lincoln’. The humour could have soared if channelled into a gentler vein of middle-aged self-mockery, but Segel and Diaz are too young and appealing to seem bored by each other. For all its running around in the night, ‘Sex Tape’ plays it remarkably coy. It’s the film equivalent of sleeping in the wet spot.